[R-pkg-devel] Should I ignore a remote-check NOTE on 'Author field differs from Authors maybe from R'?

[Ivan Krylov]

On Fri, 11 Jul 2025 18:50:44 +0000
Daniel Kelley <kelley using dal.ca> wrote:

> My concern is with the last test, i.e. on system
> 
> R version 4.4.3 (2025-02-28 ucrt)
> 
> It produces one NOTE.  Looking into this, I see the following in the
> 00check.log file:
> 
> * checking DESCRIPTION meta-information ... NOTE
> Author field differs from that derived from Authors using R
>   Author:    'Dan Kelley [aut, cre] (ORCID:
> <https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7808-5911>), Clark Richards [aut]
> (ORCID: <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7833-206X>), Chantelle Layton
> [ctb] (ORCID: <https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3199-5763>, curl()
> coauthor), British Geological Survey [ctb, cph] (magnetic-field
> subroutine)'
>   Authors using R: 'Dan Kelley [aut, cre]
> (<https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7808-5911>), Clark Richards [aut]
> (<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7833-206X>), Chantelle Layton [ctb]
> (<https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3199-5763>, curl() coauthor), British
> Geological Survey [ctb, cph] (magnetic-field subroutine)'

This is a false positive. The Author: field in your source package has
the correct text (it says ORCID: <...>), but R-4.4.3 doesn't realise
that because it predates the change to how the Author: field is
formatted.

R-4.4.x:
person("Dan", "Kelley", comment = c(ORCID =
"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7808-5911"))
# [1] "Dan Kelley (<https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7808-5911>)"

R-4.5.x:
person("Dan", "Kelley", comment = c(ORCID =
"https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7808-5911"))
# [1] "Dan Kelley (ORCID: <https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7808-5911>)"

-- 
Best regards,
Ivan